All night, I had lain awake, haunted by what Mikhail had told me about Koschei’s obsession with immortality. If Koschei ground up dead upyri for rejuvenating elixirs, then what would he do to living ones? As I had watched the bedroom fill with the hazy glow of dawn, my mind came up with its own nightmarish scenarios. Each image of torture was more terrible than the last—bone saws, scalpels, dismemberment, fire.

“Mikhail, why do you think some people come back?” I asked, trailing my fingertips along the overgrown wall. Moss and wildflowers grew in the chinks between the stones.

He glanced at me warily, as if I were testing him. “I was taught that it’s a result of the Unclean Force, that it’s heretics, sinners, and kolduny who become monsters.”

“Galina died alone in the forest,” I said at last. “She was killed, Mikhail.”

She hadn’t been a sinner, just an innocent child. Her last moments in those dark, damp woods must have been terrifying, but in death she had grown to love the forest. She would look at the ghosts of things—the crumbling izba, the black river brimming with ice floes, tumbled glass and dove bones—and see their hidden beauty. I admired her for being able to move beyond her past when I still felt haunted by my own.

“I didn’t mean to imply...” Mikhail cleared his throat. “It can also happen to murder victims like Aleksey, when someone cuts short their thread of life, or to people who die when it isn’t their time, like with the drekavcy. A hole is unraveled in their soul, and the Unclean Force flows in.”

“My parents aren’t full of the Unclean Force,” I said, bristly. “If anything’s full of the Unclean Force, it’s those men who took my sister.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, but I could tell he disagreed.

“Besides, maybe it’s not an Unclean Force,” I added. “Maybe it’s just a different one.”

“Best be careful, Toma. If we were back in the capital, they’d call that blasphemy and send the Holy Tribunal after you.” He forced a chuckle. I stared at him until his laughter died down and he turned back ahead. “That was supposed to be a joke.”

“It wasn’t funny,” I said flatly, then frowned. Something about that name, the Holy Tribunal, stuck like a nail in my throat. I sifted through my memories, trying to pair it with the fragments. “Mikhail, aren’t those the people who hunt suspected kolduny?”

“I didn’t mean it seriously, Toma.”

“But aren’t they?”

Sighing, he turned his attention back to the road. “Sometimes. Other times, it’s the military police or auxiliary forces. But most kolduny are detained within town borders, so there’s rarely a need to actually hunt them, if you’re using that word literally. The Tribunal’s role is in affording the accused the right to a fair trial and performing the executions. But the majority of their cases concern blasphemy, not witchcraft.”

His mention of witchcraft made me think back to my home. Out of all my family, only Galina had come from this part of the Edge. In their search for peace and isolation, Mama and Papa had discovered her wandering among the trenches a mere two years before Galina herself had found me. She had still been mostly fleshed.